The Coming Cloud Wars: Google+ vs Microsoft (plus Facebook)

The next year in tech will be all about building connections between PC and post-PC devices, whether phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers or next-gen SmartRoombas. They’ll be connections without cords, built on shared interfaces, proximity-based communication, and storage, syncing and computing infrastructure increasingly shifted to the cloud.

Google+ mobile apps on Android and iOS.

That’s what Tuesday’s release of OS X Lion is all about: building on the App Store and iCloud. That’s what Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 is all about: building on unified IDs on everything from Windows Phone 7 to Office to Xbox and Skype.

And I’m going to convince you that this is even what Google+ is really all about. You can see this already in Google+’s mobile apps for Android and iOS; we’ll see it more as Google continues to integrate more of its web properties into the social network.

The company-wide rollout of “+” is Google’s play for the whole stack — half Trojan horse and half battering ram.

Identity and the Social Layer

If you’re thinking of Google+ solely in terms of social networking and comparing it head-to-head with Facebook or Twitter alone, you’re making a mistake.

We’ve long passed the Friendster moment of making and browsing stand-alone databases of profile pages. Social networks don’t work that way any more, just as PCs aren’t stuck with sorting and saving local files in folders.

Dumbill calls this “the social backbone of the web.” It’s already a much bigger part of the tech ecosystem than any particular portal you may log into and stare at for part of the day reading status updates.

Fundamentally, what Facebook has done is built a way for you to figure out who people are. That system is missing in the internet as a whole. Google should have worked on this earlier. We now have a product called Google+, which has been in development for more than a year and a half, which is a partial answer to that…

I think that’s the area where I would have put more resources, developing these identity services and ranking systems that go along with that. That would have made a big difference for the internet as a whole.

At a minimum, Google+ will do the same for Google’s webapps, browsers and operating systems — and potentially many more third-party partners who want to take advantage of that sheer number of accounts. Google’s chief advantage is that unlike Facebook, it has direct access to its own giant mobile computing platform: Android.

For Schmidt, mobile computing, too, is about identity and personalization, not just communication:

Mobile devices… are inherently better [than PCs]. They’re more personal; with your permission, they know who you are [and] they can make suggestions for you.

Facebook may know who you are, but it doesn’t have Google’s or Apple’s vertical control of the computing platform on desktop or mobile. Instead, it has a trusted, longtime partner and investor who does: Microsoft.

Google’s Strategy: The Best Defense Is A Good Offense

This is why we can’t just look at these social networks head-to-head to understand what they are or what’s going to happen next. To borrow Google+’s guiding metaphor, we have to look at their extended circles. And the most important intersection of Google’s and Facebook’s extended circles is Microsoft.

Microsoft gives Facebook a foothold in voice and video chat (with Skype), search (with Bing), mobile (with WinPhone7) and potentially the desktop and living room (with Windows 8 and Xbox). In exchange, Facebook gives Microsoft an additional boost to its already powerful identity and sharing tools, which it can build into gaming, document creation and management, and other media properties.

Google didn’t need to launch a social network to win skirmishes with Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Quora or the rest; it needed a social platform to defend itself against a unified Microsoft and Facebook. Luckily, the company’s been able to defend itself in a way that also puts pressure on all of Microsoft and Facebook’s properties, from Office on down.

That’s what Vincent Wong focuses on in a clever slideshow (posted at G+, naturally), “What G+ is all about (pst!!! it’s not social).” Google, Wong argues, is pursuing a “blue ocean” strategy. Instead of fighting for market share in the highly-competitive “red ocean” of social networking at status updates, Google+ lets Google move into the still-largely-unclaimed “blue ocean” of “fixing collaboration and sharing across apps and across platforms.”

Instead of focusing on the tiny update bar on the far right of Google’s new Plus-enhanced toolbar, Wong says, we should look again at everything to the left: Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Photos, Reader, and Web. “That’s almost everything you use on your computer!” shouts the caption to one of Wong’s slides, pairing Google’s toolbar with the primary corresponding apps on both Windows and Mac OS X.

I think you can see this already in Google+’s just-released iOS app. If Google+ were seriously targeting Twitter or Tumblr, it would make it easy (rather than impossible) to reshare your friends’ content on the go like those two platforms do. Instead, Google+ for iPhone becomes a notification machine, pulling you again and again to your circles, their updates, and the media they repackage.

Like YouTube and Maps, Google+ becomes a slickly packaged trojan horse (in the original sense of the metaphor) inside Apple’s own phones. And Windows Phone? Early on, Mobile Internet Explorer wouldn’t even support G+ — and despite rumors, Google doesn’t even offer a “coming soon” for a native app.

That’s where things really get interesting — particularly if Google can turn its identity system into the kind of purchasing system that Apple and Amazon have, pairing it with its advertising power and ever-present mobile phones to create a virtual mobile wallet.

If Silicon Valley were hosting a basketball tournament for consumer money and mindshare in the cloud, right now we’d be looking at a Final Four of Google, Apple (plus Twitter), Microsoft (plus Facebook) and Amazon (especially if they can make a compelling tablet). Apple just had its earnings call; Microsoft’s is tomorrow.

The stakes are high, the players are ready. It’s a fun time to be a fan.

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